Tag Archives: recipe

Vegan Apple cake

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We really enjoyed doing the cafe for the YogaFest in Birdwood house for a second time. Hannah went to a couple of classes and loved them as much as all the particpants seemed to when they came for refreshments in the cafe space. We made some delicous treats, including hot soups, gluten-free muffins and fresh, seasonal salad – all made with local, mostly organic vegetables where possible. The sugar-free, vegan apple cake was a particular hit! So, here’s the recipe:

Sugar-free vegan apple and date cake

Peel, slice and cook 450g of cooking apples. Boil in a little bit of water, with the lid on until they are soft and falling apart. Remove from the heat and stir until you have an apple puree. Whisk 115g vegan margarine or 100ml of oil, with 115g of apple and pear spread, until well combined. Stir in 170g chopped dates. In a cup, dissolve 2 level tsp bicarbonate of soda in 1 tbsp of boiling water. Add this to the apple, then sift 225g wholemeal flour with 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ground cloves and 1/2 tsp ground allspice into the mix. Pour into a greased cake tin and bake in the oven at 180C for 45 mins-1hr. In a small pan, combine 2 tbsp of apple and pear spread or date syrup with 2 tbs soya milk until it’s all dissolved and bubbling a little. Pour this onto the cake, ensuring it’s well covered.

Enjoy!

Spring inspiration

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Spring is here! The daffodils are out and the lanes are beginning to have a faint scent of garlic as the wild leaves are sprouting and populating the hedgerows. It inspires me to walk and forage and I look forward to making wild garlic pesto which works spectacularly well with stuffed spring lamb (recipe below), in pasta sauces, risotto and swirled into dips.

Last year, it was such a pleasure to spend my Sundays wondering the lanes around Totnes, picking wild garlic. Being outdoors, rather than in an aisle of a floridly lit supermarket, plucking my ingredients for that evenings dinner (and many more – pesto keeps in the fridge for weeks). Obviously it’s not feasible to forage all our kitchen cupboard contents, but there’s something so satisfying about growing, picking, hunting and foraging your own food. Just like with Adam’s gourmet mushroom kits, where we observed over several days, the delicious and delicate oyster mushrooms grow, then harvest, cook and eat them – foraging has an innate pleasure to it.

Wild garlic is such an easily foraged, safe and simple to identify wild ingredient. It inspires me to find others. I would love to learn about seaweed, seeds and nuts, berries and wild fruits. In an age of austerity, how wonderful to be able to find free, wild and deliciously seasonal food!

My mission for this spring and summer is to forage as much as I can, to learn about foods I didn’t know about before and to cook! Watch this space for delicious recipe’s and culinary experiences.

For now, I’ll share a recipe I made last year.

Stuffed Lamb breast
for the Wild Garlic Pesto:
100g wild garlic leaves, washed well.
100g raw walnuts
Olive oil
s+p to taste
1tsp honey
whiz in a blender, adding enough oil to get a pesto consistency.

Mix the pesto with the zest of one lemon, about 200g breadcrumbs and fresh ground pepper to make a moist stuffing, adding more oil if it needs help binding. Form the mixture into a sausage shape and lay along the lamb breast and press into the meat. Roll the joint like a Swiss roll and tie with string. Wrap the joint in foil and put in a roasting tin and roast in a medium to low oven for 30 minutes. Remove the foil and roast for a further hour and 30 minutes so that it has been cooked tender right through, but it is crackly and crisp on the outside and the fat has been rendered out of it. You can add par-boiled potatoes in after about an hour of the 2 hour cooking time.

Carve the meat beforehand by simply cutting the whole joint into thin slices, handling them carefully so the stuffing doesn’t fall out. Then arrange the slices on a serving dish and put them back into the oven for a few minutes to get hot again until you are ready to serve.

Delicious with steamed spring greens, carrot and swede mash and a rich gravy!

Gourmet food grown from waste?!

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FUNGHI FUTURES, founded by Adam Saynor, is a not-for-profit social enterprise growing gourmet mushrooms from recycled waste. They make mushroom grow kits from recycled coffee grounds, with the aim to help set up a network of projects across the UK – recycling waste coffee grounds and cardboard in UK cities and turning them into delicious Gourmet Mushrooms and nutrient-rich compost.
The pearl oyster mushrooms are grown from 75% recycled coffee grounds which are full of cellulose, lignin, nitrogen, sugars and other nutrients and have already been sterilised while going through the espresso machine, and 25% recycled cardboard which comes from Paperchain – a recycling social enterprise based in Exeter who collect waste cardboard from local businesses and shred it.

Here at The Kitchen Table, having so many amazing producers and suppliers within a few miles of Totnes, we felt we could showcase what they grow, make, process and produce on a regular basis with a celebratory ‘cook-up’ every season! Adam’s beautiful mushrooms are wonderfully rich and delicious – the perfect ingredient for a gloomy January evening.

Adam gave them to us already a little started – the small pin-head fungus were showing and we watched over a few days as they blossomed into beautiful oyster mushrooms. To harvest them, on the day we did our big ‘mushroom dedicated cook-up’, we simply cut the ‘bunch’ away from the compost and we were ready to cook and eat!

Unfortunately, Adam couldn’t be at our feast but we invited some friends who loved the unique flavour of the brandy reduction and succulent mushrooms with the rare griddled wood-pidgeon breast and the delicious braised puy lentils and mushroooms that Hannah made. Both dishes were beautifully complimented by locally grown organic curly kale and a glass of red wine!

Mushrooms in brandy reduction
Ingredients:
150g finely chopped onion
2x cloves of garlic, crushed
100mls chicken stock
100mls brandy
400g oyster mushrooms (cut as you like; diced, sliced)

Method:
Sweat the onions in some good olive oil (or sustainable duck fat) on a low heat until translucent, add the garlic then the mushrooms and raise the heat a little and brown them off. Add the brandy, reduce the heat and cook for 5 minutes or so then add the stock and simmer for 20 minutes of so, stirring occasionally. The sauce should thicken and reduce.

Served great with game or beef.

Adam says “Fungi are the great recyclers of the Earth. They recycle waste… Some even produce delicious gourmet fruits along the way. Morel, Shiitake, Wine Cap, Oyster mushrooms – in the wild they all live on dead organic matter, waste… they have evolved incredible enzymes which break down the complex bonds in these materials to make use of them as their food, and ultimately to help them to produce mushrooms from. In doing so, they also recycle these materials back into the soil for trees and plants to make use of again.
… some of the enzymes they have evolved to break down wood and leaf litter are capable of breaking down other organic wastes too…
Here at Fungi Futures, we have become interested in other forms of waste that mushrooms can live on. Cardboard for one is produced and used en-masse every single day – often it’s only used once before being discarded or sent for recycling into weaker and weaker cardboard of low value. Coming from trees originally, it’s makeup is similar to wood, and many mushrooms are able to eat it up – breaking it down and producing delicious gourmet edible protein along the way.
And then there is coffee waste. Something we are all familiar with. An estimated 80 millions cups a day drunk in the UK. And what happens to the waste grounds? Most of it is put into black bags and thrown into landfill. Oyster Mushrooms, however, are a very versatile mushroom and can feed off of these tons of waste coffee grounds – converting it to rich compost and producing edible delights too.
Over the coming months we will look at other sources of waste and see what mushrooms we can grow from it. Ultimately, we think it is a crime to throw this waste away when high-value, nutritious, protein-rich food can be grown from it. It is a fact that we will not be farming so many animals in the future. The scale of our current methods are unsustainable for multiple reasons (not least the amount of land, water & fertiliser required). So, we best start looking at alternative sources of protein…And not soya – this too requires vast land and resources.
What we do have though is truck loads of waste….and a method to convert it into tasty, healthy protein. The future will undoubtedly involve more Mushrooms from Waste!”

One of the other exciting projects/ ideas Adam has is to visit schools and teach about funghi. I don’t think we learned much about this crucial part of the eco-system in my school and I can imagine watching your dinner grow, harvesting it, cooking and eating it while learning about the incredible environmental benefits of funghi would be amazing for children and young people alike!

If you would like to know more or buy a mushroom kit, check out Adam’s website – www.fungi-futures.co.uk